.. cross the bridge?

Well, there could be many answers to that. Because Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don had already done it? maybe not. Because the grass is always greener on the other side? Maybe. Because she’s a naughty chicken and had decided that laying eggs for me, despite being fed very expensive organic feed, wasn’t in her plans? Yep!

We got this hen a couple of months back, along with her other little brown friend, and she’s always been an adventurous soul and nest boxes are obviously a foreign world to her. To start with we found eggs all over the place. We thought we had an egg-incontinent hen.

A few weeks back I found her in the new meadow laying her eggs in the bracken. A bit of extra fencing put a stop to that.

Then over the last week or so we thought that she must have stopped laying. Her eggs are the brownest of the lot, so easy to spot. I searched all over the field but to no avail. Then one morning as I was letting them out, I spotted her doing a passable Usain Bolt charge across the field to the little gate in the corner. A quick flap of her wings and she was over and gone.

I searched all around that area, but couldn’t find anything.

So next morning I tried a bit harder to follow her. Again no luck, so on Saturday I enlisted Sue’s help and we struck gold. Across the field, over the gate and ….. over the bridge! After that a quick scoot through the potager, down to Cedric and down the bank by the big tree that came down last year and tucked up under the next tree was our hen and half a dozen eggs! Surely it would have been easier and quicker to hop / fly over the stream?

This morning I was armed with the camera.

So that is why the chicken crossed the bridge!